


Stellar Moments

by TransientThoughts



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Accidental Eavesdropping, Angst, Dancing, Drabble Collection, Episode Fix-It: s04e13 Journey's End, Everybody Lives, F/M, Ficlet, Ficlet Collection, Fix-It, Fluff, Good times, Idiots in Love, Introspection, One Shot, One Shot Collection, POV Outsider, Post-Episode: s02e13 Doomsday, Post-Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, Slow Dancing, Sorry Not Sorry, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Vignette, and the Doctor being really sad as always, because no one hurts my Rose or my Donna, coping with loss and memory, donna is the narrator, it started off really sweet but then got angsty, of sorts, will keep adding tags as I go along
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25381696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TransientThoughts/pseuds/TransientThoughts
Summary: More often than not, it is the most ordinary moments that change the course of history.The Doctor knows this well.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who) & Rose Tyler
Comments: 1
Kudos: 36
Collections: Time Petals Prompts





	1. The signal

She had always been good at listening. Not that she was quiet or shy or reserved in any way, mind you—it was just a skill; that’s how she preferred to think about it. And as such, it could be trained, honed and perfectioned. For years now, this skill had been both her tool and companion. It had gotten her a few promotions, too.

She had never been a military kind of person, but she found her job at UNIT paid off more than well. Especially when all she had to do was monitor frequencies on speakers and computer screens: satellites, probes, missions, teleport jumps and, occasionally, external threats. It was peaceful, or, as peaceful as it could be in an organization of national— _and global_ —security. She loved it anyways.

But there was a particular signal she was fond of; one that made her jump in her seat without fail every time it appeared on the incoming monitor. It was unusual; rare, to say the least. There was no logical way to predict when it would arrive; there seemed to be no consistency. More or less, however, there was a pattern, a certain degree of periodicity. Once every year, give or take, without further notice, they would receive a message—no codification, no encryption whatsoever—from some random coordinates that located the source somewhere around the Earth orbit.

“Hello! This is the Doctor in the TARDIS,”

It always began like that. The squeaky voice and the glee in his tone reminded her of old customized voicemail. She used to have one like that on her Nokia, years ago.

But that was never the full message.

“Oi!”

“Oh, yes! Sorry, this is the Doctor and Rose Tyler in the TARDIS,”

Ah. TARDIS. Time and Relative Dimension in Space. Him. And _her_. Everyone knew about them. And nobody did. Since the Christmas invasion and Canary Wharf, they’d had records about them (sketchy as they were). And then there came the vanishing stars and the stolen planets and their story took on the shining hue of legends and myths. Immortal.

Or almost.

They had been receiving the same signal for eighty years now. Eighty years.

Most of the times, the messages were trivial, hardly more than a routine check-up.

“Hi, this is Rose Tyler and the Doctor in the TARDIS,”

“Bonjour, Buongiorno or Guten Morgen! This is the Doctor and…”

There’d be sounds of thumps, metallic bangs and clangs of all sorts and the frequency would wobble. Her best guess was that the ship was going through some kind of turbulences. A few seconds after nevertheless, they’d come to a halt and the wavelength would be stable again, and the next sound she heard were always their voices, breaking into a relieved but lively laughter, and she couldn’t help but wonder what the bloody hell was so funny about turbulences in deep space.

Unfortunately, the signal only transmitted sound. She had asked some of the technicians about it, but they said that if they were truly sending visual input, the video frequency was probably lost somewhere along the wavelength. Pity, really. She would’ve given anything to see their faces, just one time. No matter how short or brief the messages were, there always seemed to be a certain atmosphere, like a bubble: a microcosm encased in a single audio track, a shared something between the two speakers that gave away more than their words ever could. 

“UNIT control tower, this is Martha Jones speaking from the TARDIS,”

“Hello! Donna Noble here, in the old box. Do you read me? Do you read me? Um, I feel like I’m in one of those films… What! How do you mean they can’t hear me?”

But they weren’t the only ones speaking. There was a whole range of voices. With enough time and care, she had come to memorize all of them. Some older, some younger, some light, some teasing, some serious—but they all seemed to share, to drink from the same microcosm of glee and wonder and something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

The frequency fascinated her beyond measure. It was like nothing she’d ever heard. 

And so, she listened.

Sometimes, he told puns. Very, very bad, awful puns. As to why he did this, she had no idea. The ship’s signal was unidirectional; it wasn’t a conversation, it wasn’t a telephone line. And yet, odd as it seemed, it was as if he _knew_ that there’d be a keen ear on the other end, that somehow, whoever it was, whatever life they led, they wouldn’t mind a cheering up, something to throw them off the monotony and make their day just a little brighter. And he succeeded, every time. 

“Never trust atoms… they make up everything!”

“Okay, that’s it, spaceman, I’m booting you out of the TARDIS right now!”

But there was always laughter in the background, and she knew it was alright. And there was no helping it: she laughed with them, too.

Other times, he left songs to be transmitted through the frequency, wavelengths floating on into oblivion. Funnily enough, they were all from the Beatles. Who would’ve thought.

Whenever she got bored, on particularly quiet nights, when the world was safe and the office empty, her mind itched with curiosity and she retrieved some of the previous messages. She played them all from the beginning. One gigantic rewind.

“Hello there, beautiful. This is Captain Jack Harness speaking, how’s your day going?”

“Jackie, no, no, no! Please, don’t touch that!”

“Hello! This is Rose Tyler and the, err, is that water? Doctor, what the hell! The swimming pool is leaking again!”

“Hi! This is Tony Tyler in the TARDIS. You should see this place, it’s the coolest ship in the…”

***

She awoke with a deep buzz in her ears.

Her neck ached and every limb felt heavy and numb. Trying to blink the pain away, she raised her head from the unforgiving spot on a too messy desk and her gaze wandered over the controls. The monitor showing the audio track had given way to dead static. A terminal patient. She switched it off and the buzz drilling into her head ceased. The room should’ve succumbed to silence, but for some reason it didn’t. It was not until a few seconds later that she noticed the alarm.

Incoming signal.

She was suddenly thrown off her chair. Her mind felt brilliantly clear all of a sudden, as she started to fiddle with the keyboard. Adjusting the alignment of the radio frequency, she gave permission to the caller and opened all the audio tracks. One monitor to her left jumped unexpectedly to life. She squinted at the bright Technicolor. To her growing astonishment, there was visual input.

She froze.

The image of a person appeared on the screen: a man. Grey. Old. Frame thin as bone. And a frown just as prominent as his nose. There was a sense of enigma about him, something ancient and unfathomable, but also of nakedness, a kind of vulnerability that only came with things lost, eyes heavy with something akin to sadness. The quality of the image was fuzzy and blurred, the connection weak, but there was no mistake as to who that was.

It was long before he spoke.

“Hello, this is the Doctor in the TARDIS,”

Gone were the squeaky jokes and the goofy laugh. It was the first time she heard that voice: dark and measured and… Scottish?

This time, there were no other voices. No other people in the background. He was alone.

She had a sense of foreboding.

Because, after all these years, after decades and decades of inconsequential messages and unsteady signals, after songs and puns and travels and bumps and clangs and bangs and laughter, there had only been one constant, and one constant only. Because, after all this time…

“After all this time, it was always her.”

The Doctor made his last confession, and she listened.


	2. Moonlight Serenade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An old tune echoes across the TARDIS's corridors

Donna awoke with a frown and the hum of a song ringing in her ears.

She had never been the kind of person to turn a blind eye and ignore an inconvenience (her neighbours knew this well, when they decided to drill together that horrid IKEA furniture one Wednesday evening and she appeared on their doorstep with her arms crossed and her deadly glare), and faithful to her principles, she got up.

Immediately she felt something in her stomach starting to boil because _who the hell thought it was a good idea to give a fucking symphonic concert at 2am, do you think this is the Royal Albert Hall or something?_ And she was more than ready to slap her palm across Ziggy Stardust’s face and send him straight into his next regeneration if it was necessary.

The diabolical tune grew louder as she walked through the lengthy corridor, and Donna bristled and fumed. However, when she finally turned the corner to the console room and her hands were about to occupy their usual spot on her hips, something stopped her in her tracks.

She found them there.

She should’ve guessed he wasn’t alone; he was never alone these days. 

Oh.

 _Oh_.

They were dancing.

Or something like it.

Because there was barely any space between them and they stood so close that they were stepping over each other’s feet, but they didn’t seem to mind one bit. Because they swayed in a lazy, vague motion that hardly matched the rhythm at all. Because their eyes were closed and the hands were burrowed deep, clutching the fabric of his suit and her jacket. Because it was the sort of embrace she had only seen in cheesy films and cheap soaps that would make her roll her eyes away with annoyance. Because it was clear that the music was just a petty excuse and the dancing a farce. And because, to top it all off, for the most unfathomable of reasons, neither of them was wearing shoes.

The sight brought a smile to her face, of all things. And she would never admit it to herself, but her frown softened just a bit. Her hand fell to her sides, and whatever anger that had been building up inside her died out like a candle.

It was an old song. Very old. It reminded her of long dresses and black and white Hollywood musicals, from the forties or fifties. Glenn Miller or Benny Goodman or something like that. It was one she was sure to have listened to somewhere, _somewhen_ , but she couldn’t quite pinpoint the time nor the place. Her gramps would’ve known; he would love it. Probably there had been an evening, long ago, out in the hill, with his modern telescope and his archaic radio, when these very tunes had started to play, filling the winter air, and he had fiddled shakily with the knobs and turned up the volume, his face alight with the excitement of a child at Christmas. _Donna, listen! This, this is a classic!_ And he had probably told her the title, but she found she couldn’t quite remember.

It was beautiful nonetheless.

Even the buzzes and whirrs of the TARDIS seemed to have dimmed down in favour of the music.

Cheeky ship.

The song kept on playing and the dancers were all left feet. What a pair. And then, in an almost unnoticeable shift, she lifts her head from his shirt and mutters something that the melody leaves muffled and obscure, and Donna can’t make out the words. But inexplicably, wonderfully, he throws back his head in laughter and she joins until they’re both stifling the laughs on each other’s shoulder. And there it is again, that light. It’s only in rare occasions that she’s seen it, but there’s no mistaking that it’s there, in his eyes. Time slows down when the Doctor smiles, and right now the whole universe is frozen, every planet and star still on its axis. Like a photograph.

_Long time no see._

And Donna still doesn’t know much about her—only that her name is Rose and she lived in South London and that she’s been gone for a long time—but already she has no doubts: what a bloody amazing woman.

She gave one last look at the scene: God, they were awful and sappy and embarrassing to watch, and they were _beaming_.

And as Donna headed back to her room, the hum of the melody didn’t quite bother her half as much as before. In fact, she found she didn’t mind at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written for the prompt "dancing" of Timepetalsweek 2020 :)
> 
> Okay, this may just be the fluffiest thing I've ever written, so if it gives you diabetes, please be aware that I won't be held accountable in any way for your medical bills. Plus, there's some fanart I did to go with the chapter, find it on my Tumblr  
> [@alwaysdramatizing](https://alwaysdramatizing.tumblr.com/post/624383117291044865/alwaysdramatizing-donna-awoke-with-a-frown-and)
> 
> That said, enjoy!
> 
> Also I didn't think it through beforehand, but I later found that Donna being the narrator was just the coolest thing ever. So here she is, the queen, speaking the truth as always. 
> 
> Btw, If you were wondering what it was that Rose said, she said “you still got the moves!”, because they hadn't danced since his last regeneration and honestly, that was a crime


	3. Mementos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of places and things lost

Jackie took the ripped envelope with reverent hands.

It didn’t make sense, not really. How time passed in this world. Sometimes, of course, she wouldn’t even notice, because calendars here still had twelve months and clocks an hour hand and a minute hand; others, however, she woke up thinking about the ludicrous hole a killer Christmas tree had left in her bedroom and just _how_ _expensive_ fixing it was going to be, only to find herself in a four-poster bed with silk sheets in a room like the bedchamber of Henry VIII, and everything around her crumbled. Those days were the hardest. Those days, she could feel the past like it was around the corner, just at the end of her fingertips— _Rose, you came back! Oh, and you, big fella! You’re all mine!—_ and at the same time distant, remote and non-existent, fading in the way dreams fade the moment you blink awake.

Those days, Jackie thought, she was one step closer to understanding her daughter. Because, despite the weeks and the months, she still catches the haunted looks, never misses the blank stares. Because it was just yesterday that she was holding her trembling body in a beach in Norway, and yet it wasn’t. It had been one year and a half. In those moments, Jackie was sure that there was something terribly wrong about the way the cogs turned in this world.

She’d thought she’d like it.

What a silly idea that seemed now. 

She shakes the envelope and the paper falls soundless as a feather.

There is only one picture. She had been dismayed when she found out, but Mickey told her that the rest of the files were corrupted and that there was nothing else he could do. Bless him. Those old mobiles had never been too reliable, anyway.

They were smiling.

Why, of course they were smiling, it was the only thing they seemed to be able to do around each other. Her with the dimples on her cheeks, and him with that barmy face and those barmy eyebrows. She didn’t know when it had become their trademark, only that it had.

They were pointing at something outside of the frame, their raised arms cut by the elbow. It must have been something incredible, no doubt, for their eyes were wide and shining. Inexplicably, they both wore two pairs of sunglasses, maintaining an precarious balance at the top of their heads, but they were too lost in whatever it was that had caught their attention to care. The quality of the image is fuzzy and the background is a blur of grey and blue. They could’ve been in Spain or in a moon colony lightyears away from Earth, and she wouldn’t be able to tell. Their expression is one of sheer wonder, and she thinks that’s how they should’ve looked, forever.

Forever wondering, forever marvelling. 

And she had once been so worried—worried that she’d lose herself, that on every ship and planet and asteroid she visited, she’d leave a piece of herself behind until there was nothing left. It couldn’t have been further from the truth: her daughter, she realized, had found herself among the stars, and she had _soared_. And for some reason, this realization brings a pain to her chest greater than any other. And she regrets, regrets, regrets, regrets, regrets, regrets so deeply she can feel her guts turn inside out.

And it only gets worse, because every day she sees her, and she’s trying so hard to build, she’s trying so hard to create and not destroy. To leave a mark, to carve a niche of her own, fit in the spaces between offices and parties and rooms twice the size of their flat. But it’s like Rose always tells her: “I was never born here. There isn’t a hole with my outline. If I want a place for myself, I have to start from scratch.”

Jackie can feel her hands shaking.

She doesn’t know when her daughter became so wise.

Indeed, it is those gaps. It’s those gaps she feels when she wakes up in a bed that’s not hers, with a husband that might look like hers, but he’s alive and well and no longer a ghost. It’s terrifying.

They had left a hole with their outline when they left, and Jackie wonders what it might look like. An empty council flat. With her cheap furniture, a leaky fridge and a broken washing machine. With a tiny bathroom with bad lighting and a crooked mirror. With two bedrooms cluttered with years and years of trinkets and keepsakes that would no longer hold any meaning whatsoever: Christmas postcards and old blankets and earrings and dirty clothes and a bronze medal and magnets of places they never visited.

Of all that, would remain nothing.

But in her mind, as she envisions it, to her surprise she realizes that the house isn’t empty. Not completely. She imagines a shadow, a lonely figure in a long coat, standing in the middle of it all like a salt statue.

She wonders if he will mourn them for long.

And hopes that he will.

Because, as she holds the picture in her hands, she thinks of paper crowns and garlands and laughter and ash instead of snow, and she too, mourns.

***

Someone stands still on Walworth Road and the Earth keeps turning.

The burden had been his to bear.

And that was okay.

It’s always been like this.

Every person he meets leaves a load when they part ways—a bundle of memories, of good times and bad times and a little bit of this, and oh, also a little bit of _that_ —and he carries it gladly. Sometimes with sorrow, and pain, but always gladly. It’s the least he can do. It’s his duty. Or something like it, anyway. The word is too formal and too pompous and he doesn’t like how it sounds in any case.

But it wasn’t a sense of obligation that drove him here. Not because he felt that he had to, or that he owed them (even though he owes them, so much), but because he feels if he doesn’t honour what’s left of them, he doubts that anyone else will. And he can let the world forget—because humanity always forgets, humanity always moves on—their names and their faces and the footprints they left along their path, but _he_ _won’t_.

So he steps into the flat.

For some reason, he didn’t think there’d be silence. This was never a place for silence; for chatter and laughter, always; for quiet, sometimes; but never for this sheer blankness, this void of sound. Now, however, there is so much of it he’s afraid the flat will burst. He could quantify it, estimate it, calibrate its exact weight and mass, because this silence is something tangible, something that looms and lurks and creeps onto your back. There’s something about it that unnerves this body. This silence makes his nerves itch and tingle and he wants to flee like a scared animal.

But he can’t bring himself to break it.

The TARDIS waits in the children’s playground, because parking it on the front room felt irreverent, and because Jackie always complained about the marks the old ship left on the carpet. Now he’s three floors up, foldaway cardboard boxes under his arm, and he’s crossed the threshold and it’s silent. It takes eight tentative steps, twenty-seven feet and 6.3 inches, and he’s in the living room. He can see the kitchen from his vantage point: the tap dripping every 0.9 seconds and the dirty dishes still in the sink and a mug on the table and everything is so _there_ and it looks so very much _the same_ that it aches. And suddenly it seems like the air turns liquid and dense and the Doctor freezes.

It’s like a snow globe.

It dawns on him that he doesn’t want to touch anything, that he’d rather die before moving a frame or a chair an inch from their current resting place. He wants to keep it this way, forever; preserve an ordinary, utterly unimportant empty council flat against the ravages of time, uncorrupted and uncorruptible. Nothing more and nothing less than a home, lived-in and worn-out, with specks of dust dancing against the sunlight and a half-finished cuppa still waiting for its owner to return. To come back.

He thinks he might wait, too.

He drops the cardboard boxes, and it isn’t until then that he notices.

Beside a too-familiar rucksack, there is a square plastic box. A disposable camera. The classic FujiFilm.

Attached to it, a pink sticky note.

 _Develop_.

Once, it might have been a trivial reminder, just one among the many things in a to-do list, but now it feels more like a dying wish. Unfulfilled. 

He doesn’t think it twice.

He’s sprinting down the stairs before he can register that his body is moving at a disproportionate speed, the odds of missing a step and breaking his spine increasing exponentially.

There’s never been a dark room in the TARDIS, and it occurs to him that he should build one, one day. Why didn’t the TARDIS have a dark room? The TARDIS most definitely _should_ have a dark room. That way, at least, he’d save the sidelong glances and the startled faces. Oh. Barging in again, aren’t we, Doctor?

It’s one of those little street shops, wedged and squeezed, fighting for space between a Tesco and an ATM, where you can have your photos printed in an hour and a puzzle or a keychain made with your face on it. Genius. At the counter were two employees with name tags attached to their breast pockets, and they both looked like they were about to ask him to leave. But he’s quick to slam the camera on the counter and rummage his pockets until he finds the right currency, and suddenly their faces turn bright and trustworthy.

So he waits—one hour, as the advert says—and the soles of his chucks punctuate the passing of each second.

When they give him the envelope, he stumbles back onto the street and rips it open.

The crowds pass him by, but he’s glued to the sidewalk from head to toe.

Out of the whole roll of film, there are only three photos.

The first one is a table, the tablecloth faded at the edges and with a couple of burst seams, laid out with all sorts of foods—almost _too much_ food—looking like an impromptu banquet, messy and exaggerated and _inviting_ , and he knows exactly when it was taken.

He can’t say the same about the second one.

It’s the cracker they pulled, on a Christmas Eve that was both the first and the last. It was all glitter on the outside until it popped with a short loud bang. The paper crown had been pink and it had matched his, and she had been _elated_. Halfway through dinner, the telly had blared a season classic and they had tried to dance, tumbling ridiculously as to avoid the chairs and the sofa and _oh, careful there, that’s the china figurine cousin Mo brought from Belgium!_ They had gotten tangled with the tinsel in the process, but her grin had been as wide as her cheeks stretched. Only now, he realizes, that he had been grinning too. Perhaps that was why he couldn’t remember the click of the camera, or Jackie fussing about saying _cheese!_

He has no clue when this moment happened, only that it came and it was gone in the blink of an eye.

And then the Doctor is left alone, standing still on Walworth Road, and his face is lined with tears.

He only catches a brief glimpse of the third photograph before he shoves the envelope into his coat pocket. It was dark, barely an outline, of two figures pointing at the sky.

_I spent Christmas day just over there, at the Powell Estate, with this... family. My friend, she had this family. Well. It was my…_

Bringing his hands to his face, he pushes his palms against the globes of his eyes until patterns emerge under the pressure, but no matter how hard he tries the tears keep falling.

The Doctor stands still and the crowds pass him by.

The Earth keeps turning.

An the burden, this time, is too heavy to bear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted for the Timepetals week 2020, for the prompt 'family'
> 
> I apologize for the angst, but the found family trope gets me every time.  
> Sometimes I think about the Doctor visiting The Powell Estate after Rose is gone and I melt into a puddle of tears, that's all it takes.
> 
> Kudos and comments will not only be appreciated, but they will cleanse my soul as well :')

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for the Timepetals week 2020, with the prompt "after all this time, it was always her"
> 
> Just want to introduce this work by saying that Doctor Who got to me during lockdown and this is the outcome.  
> It started off as something funny and sweet, but I ended up making a thesis on the overarching themes of the show. I'm sorry :/
> 
> There'll probably be more similar one-shots in upcoming chapters, if I ever get down to it. Hopefully.  
> Anyway, enjoy!


End file.
